Tania Nugent: One of the most exciting indigenous acts going around in the world today is Aotearoa's Moana and the Tribe - led by the charismatic songstress Moana Maniapoto. I caught their show at Australia's big indigenous festival, The Dreaming and jumped at the chance to chat with Moana about her music, her messages and protecting Maori culture.

Moana Maniapoto: I was brought up in a family where my father always had a guitar and ukulele in the lounge. My father and his brothers are orators on our marai, our community place, and it's custom that, after a speech, a song is always sung, so my sisters, my four sisters and my brother and I were expected to sing.

But when I first started singing for money, I was always tried to sound black. I wanted to be an Afro-American singer, my heroes were like Aretha Franklin and Chaka Kan. And it wasn't until I found myself in a Baptist church in Detroit, being instructed that I was to get up and sing in front of 600 Afro-Americans that I realised now was not a good time to try and sound like Aretha Franklin. So I sang a Maori song because I thought, "oh well, if I stuff it up they won't know anyway". And it was the ...kind of an empowerment thing for me, and that's when I had my little epiphany, and I thought, well, the things that I have taken for granted that are right in front of me, those should be my resources as a song writer.

And most of the songs I write about are inspired by things that are happening around me, it might be a push for the language, the Maori language to be retained and revived; concern about environmental issues; songs to women, talking about the connections between us and the ancestors. So yeah, those are my kind of love songs.

I think when I first started singing and writing songs, I was really writing it for Maori back in New Zealand to uplift ourselves, we were going through a lot of political issues, and I think we needed to be reminding ourselves about how valuable we are.

But as we travelled more offshore, even though I was still writing about and for my people, I realised that a lot of the values and a lot of the issues that were inspiring me are actually common to peoples around the world.

Tania Nugent: Moana and The Tribe was formed in 2002. Back then they were just called Moana. It was on the band's first trip to Europe that things changed.

Moana Maniapoto: Our record company was threatened with a law suit because my name was trademarked by a German media company, so they said if you continue to advertise yourself as Moana and sell your albums under that name, we will sue you for over $100,000. So, we actually had to have an out of court settlement, where we paid them money for using my name.

Tania Nugent: Your own name?

Moana Maniapoto: Yeah.

Tania Nugent: It led Moana to a new cause to raise awareness about.

Moana Maniapoto: How is it that a foreign based company that has no relationship with New Zealand can register a trademark for a Maori and a Polynesian name? Our experience is that companies want to use our symbols, they think it's their right to help themselves to it, they don't feel there is any need for any financial or any other benefit to go back to the people from whom it came.

We have to watch that as musicians and as Maori, because we like to help ourselves to other people's songs and translate them into Maori. We have be careful about how we...we have to monitor ourselves too, as indigenous people.